John Pepper says he’s always had an “eating problem.” The CEO and co-founder of Boloco was raised in a family of three boys, and he says it was “all about quantity” in the Pepper household, with the kids always fighting to get their fair share of food at the dinner table.

Carrying that childhood mentality with him through college, Pepper describes how he entered chili dog and taco eating contests to get his fill.

“My point is…how I got started with food is really, almost an obsession with being a consumer of food,” he explains. “That’s really the very unattractive beginning.”

Burritos came into the picture when Pepper moved west to San Francisco after undergrad and his eyes were opened to truly authentic Mexican food. “I really developed an irrational passion for burritos,” he says of his time living out west. One restaurant in particular specialized in putting any and all types of food into flour tortillas, and Pepper quickly became their “number one customer.”

“I got to business school, and I couldn’t stop talking about it,” says Pepper of the specialty wraps that inspired him to create what would eventually become Boloco. “It really started, at the beginning of it, as a passionate customer.”

Pepper developed Boloco’s first “real” business plan as a second year MBA student. “I thought to myself, ‘There’s no risk to doing it. It cannot fail.’” In hindsight, he says, there were obvious ways for it to fail, but that attitude is what differentiates entrepreneurs from the rest of us – failure is not an option.

During this time, Pepper wrote letters to Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, and although they had never met, Pepper was motivated by Schultz’s business model and dedication to building a company culture that cares about its employees.

“What Howard Schultz did with Starbucks in the ‘90s was super inspiring for someone starting a business,” says Pepper, who eventually had the opportunity to meet Schultz and flourish under his mentorship. “He really pushed me to remember that there are new layers you can get into.”

Closer to home, Pepper looked up to his father as “a reminder of how to avoid becoming super corporate and how to keep an edge and stay different and don’t settle and certainly don’t become part of the status quo.”

Taking what he learned from Schultz and his father, over the last 15 years, Pepper has built an inspired burrito empire throughout Boston, and just opened the first Washington, D.C. location. There have been ups and downs, and while Pepper acknowledges that his main job as CEO is to propel company growth, he still dedicates a large portion of his job to building company culture.

“Culture is such a stupid word,” he says bluntly. “The question is, can you really turn it into a daily activity? The answer is yes, if you really believe in it.”

He looks to a modified version of a quote from Life is good to guide his practices: “Nobody ever got poor by being generous.”

For Pepper, that means taking an extra 15 minutes out of his day to talk to someone he wouldn’t normally talk to, asking what his employees want, and making sure they actually get it.

On the customer side of things, he abides by three simple rules: “No bragging, try to be humble, and be grateful about the people who like what we do.”

The burritos are good, but for Pepper, “The relationships we build with people are the most fun.”